[784] Medical Humanities
- What are the cultural, social, ethical and economic challenges of contemporary health policies?
- How do we build a contextualized, critical and far-sighted point of view on past and present medical practice?
- Why are certain diseases resistant to modern scientific knowledge?
- What are the roles assigned to the physician in the past, in the present... and in the future? How can we understand the behaviour of past practitioners?
- Is biomedicine opposed to literature? Are there still poet-physicians?
- How do new IT technologies and mass media influence health debates?
- How does yesterday's medical ethics differ from today's? What is narrative medicine?
- Can we narrate the history of the future of medicine?
Our research is methodologically grounded in the humanities. It addresses the intellectual and scientific challenges that medicine faces in the context of ever-changing societies. As literary scholars, historians or philosophers working in a Faculty of Medicine, our research is interdisciplinary. We collaborate with clinicians as well as with researchers is basic sciences, with cultural institutions (the Martin Bodmer Foundation, the Geneva Museum of the History of Science, etc.) and with international and non-governmental organizations (WHO, United Nations Library, MSF, etc.).